3 ms·
Micro SD cards are up to about ~290 MB/s for read times these days, IIRC. That's the same as low-end SSDs.
by minsc__and__boo 5y ago
Micro SD cards are up to about ~290 MB/s for read times these days, IIRC. That's the same as low-end SSDs.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoThat's throughput. IOPS is important. For random 4kb blocks / second SD Card => 2.1 [1] SSD => ~200 [2] [1] https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/reviews/micro-sd-cards/ https://www.cameramemoryspeed.com/reviews/micro-sd-cards/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS And that's comparing good SD cards to good SSDs. As I was saying, bad SD cards can be REALLY bad. The difference can be over 1000x. Anything that depends on being able to read ANY small piece of information regularly in a reasonable amount of time from disk would simply not be playable.
- minsc__and__boo 5y agoThat's assuming the games are writing to the SD cards and not the SSD though, right? If this is Debian/Arch OS, I'd assume they are writing to a system folder.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoNo - those are random READS - not writes. If the game is on the SD Card - it will be read from the SD card. Sure, if the game needs to randomly write data to disk (I assume this is much rarer) - then it would write to the system SSD as usual.
- minsc__and__boo 5y agoGot it. So SD cards are optimized for large, continuous file reads, not varied file reads.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y agoI'm not sure that's what they're optimized for. I think it's more of just that's how the technology works. It's the same way I wouldn't say that film is optimized for storing lots of data with horrible access cheaply. It just happens to be what it is.